Washington’s Blog notes how the CIA’s torture techniques resemble those used by the Nazis.

The Nazis called it “Verschärfte Vernehmung,” German for “enhanced interrogation.”

“It’s a phrase that appears to have been concocted in 1937, to describe a form of torture that would leave no marks, and hence save the embarrassment pre-war Nazi officials were experiencing as their wounded torture victims ended up in court. The methods, as you can see above, are indistinguishable from those described as ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ by the president,” The Atlantic wrote in 2007.

According to author and researcher Annie Jacobsen, former Nazis were at the forefront of developing torture techniques for the United States government.

“The work took place inside a clandestine facility in the American zone of occupied Germany, called Camp King. The facility’s chief medical doctor was Operation Paperclip’s Dr. Walter Schreiber, the former Surgeon General of the Third Reich… The activities that went on at Camp King between 1946 and the late 1950s have never been fully accounted for by either the Department of Defense or the CIA,” Jacobsen writes.

A d v e r t i s e m e n t

While early CIA torture concentrated on extracting information from Soviet spies, it was later used to create a propaganda narrative.

Former CIA boss George Tenet: We don’t torture.

Washington’s Blog notes that “the specific type of torture used by the U.S. last decade is even worse … it was a systematic program of torture specially designed in order to intentionally create false confessions.”

This was admitted by Sen. Carl Levin, the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services.

“In SERE (Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape) training, U.S. troops are briefly exposed, in a highly controlled setting, to abusive interrogation techniques used by enemies that refuse to follow the Geneva Conventions,” Levin remarked. “The techniques are based on tactics used by Chinese Communists against American soldiers during the Korean War for the purpose of eliciting false confessions for propaganda purposes.”

The technique was used extensively as the Bush neocons cobbled together fabrications used to rationalize the war on terror and provide a pretext for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

“Despite what you’ve seen on TV, torture is really only good at one thing: eliciting false confessions,” Dan Froomkin wrote for The Washington Post. “Indeed, Bush-era torture techniques, we now know, were cold-bloodedly modeled after methods used by Chinese Communists to extract confessions from captured U.S. servicemen that they could then use for propaganda during the Korean War.”

Liberals are miffed Obama will not prosecute those responsible for violating the law. “So the question is why Obama decided to spare the torturers,” Eric Posner writes for Slate, the liberal website owned by Graham Holdings, a conglomerate named after CIA operative Philip Graham, editor Washington Post, and point man for Operation Mockingbird, the CIA’s “Mighty Wurlitzer” conversion of a free press into a massive government propaganda machine.

This reveals what on the surface appears to be political naiveté. It isn’t, though. It is another rabbit hole designed to deceive a habitually deceived American public.

Torture, as a propaganda tool, is a required asset for the state. Otherwise the bottom would fall out of the manufactured war on terror, the latest scam perpetuated by the financial elite and the military-industrial complex.